Other essays acknowledge the fact that intimacy requires time and attention in “Ode to Slowness,” “Home Work,” “Buried Poems,” “Perfect Kiva,” and “To Be Taken,” Williams deals with the “slow art of revolutionary patience” in creating change 122 WAL 37.1 SPRING 2002 (98). “Earth,” “Water,” “Fire,” “Air,” “River Music,” “The Bowl,” “A Woman’s Dance,” and “The Erotic Landscape” reveal a desire for connection and intimacy. Such communication, Williams implies, necessitates passion and patience.
Below are some of the questions she asks: ♦ “How are we to find our way toward conversation?” (3) ♦ “How do the stories we tell about ourselves in relationship to place shape our perceptions of place?” (4) ♦ “How can I learn to write out of my own experience, out of my deep love for wild country, while still maintaining a language that opens minds rather than closes them?” (11) ♦ “What do these places have to say to us as human beings at this point in time?” (68) The questions become a kind of poetic catechism not of religious faith but of a belief in the need to commune and communicate with people as well as places. Williams’s writing foregrounds the importance of questions, which she seeks to answer indirectly through her prose. The power and beauty of the places she describes and of her own writing draw attention to the exigency of political action. Providing a model of what it is to be both artist and activist, Williams en courages readers of western American literature and those who share a passion for particular places to “recall the transformative power of wildness and remem ber it survives now only through vigilance” (17). Diverse in terms of genre, RED’s mix of story, essay, list, tribute, and tes timony demonstrates the personal and political ground upon which Williams stands. Goldthwaite Saint Joseph’s University, Philadelphia Terry Tempest Williams dedicates RED: Passion and Patience in the Desert to both a group of people (The Coyote Clan, “individuals who are quietly sub versive on behalf of the land” ) and a place (America’s Redrock Wilder ness- 9,286,640 acres of proposed wilderness and national park service lands in Utah). RED : Passion and Patience in the Desert. She does, however, make it impossible for her readers ever again to take her desert homeland for granted. For Westerners in need of enlightenment on just how this waltz between nature and humanity may end, Meloy has no final answers. Your yellow cake is a chunk of old highway’ ” (194). In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ī o o k R eviews 1 2 1 here is your basic gravel-pit granola mixed with petroleum product.
0 kommentar(er)
